1. Field of Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate in general to the field of network telephony. More specifically, embodiments of the invention relate to methods and systems for call management in the field of network telephony.
2. Description of the Background Art
The Internet is used for telephony in addition to data transfer. To transmit voice via the Internet, sound signals at the sender's end are digitized and divided into small data packets. A stream of such data packets is sent to a destination through a packet-switching data network. The received digitized sound signals are converted back into analog signals at the destination.
In a conventional technique, management of the network telephony system includes the configuration of dial plans for calls to various locations. The configuration involves a level of control, using an ordered list of partitions that users can look at before placing a call. A partition comprises a logical grouping of Directory Numbers (DNs) and route patterns with similar reachability characteristics. The ordered list of partitions provides the source and destination. Dial plans are used to define a number prefix that carries specific significance. For example, if a user dials a number prefixed by a 9 it could mean an external call or if a user dials 9 followed by 0 it could mean that it is a long distance call. Since this is fundamental to the ability of the users to make calls it needs to be accurate at an end-to-end level. However, this configuration introduces a number of sites, providers and redundancy configurations. Therefore, it becomes difficult to debug a call, when one of these configurations breaks.
In another conventional technique, a dial plan is analyzed for management of network telephony system. The dial plan is an addressing method defined by a network administrator. However, analyzing the dial plan is restricted to a cluster. This restriction makes troubleshooting problems in dial plan configuration across multiple call agents difficult. Further, in Internet Protocol (IP) gateway scenarios, numbers are translated into Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). Debugging and tracing the locations in the routing network where the calls fail is hindered when the numbers are translated into URI. Current tools address this at a single system level, however, the end-to-end plan management is still manual and requires tedious labor.
Yet another conventional technique traces the path of a call. In this case, a global call id is inserted in the call-signaling messages, which alerts the systems to send troubleshooting information to the Network Managing Station (NMS). However, the process of tracing the path of the call is restricted only to active calls, and the technique cannot be used in pre-deployment scenarios. This is an intrusive means of testing the signaling linkage of a dialed number.